I won’t bore you by discussing the weather for too long, but it’s been really nice here this week and looks like it will continue to be. It’s been great for running…and as far as races go, now I’m considering running the half tomorrow AND the following weekend, just for the heck of it. When I picked up my bib yesterday I asked the woman about switching to the 10K and she got really confused, and so I thought, well, yes, and I can just run it, but my bib says half marathon, so doing the 10K seems like that would be failing…but yet…I just don’t know. I’ll decide this evening, or tomorrow morning when I arrive. I asked Louie if he thought that was crazy and suggested that for some people it would be very common place, to run two half marathons in two weekends, and for other people it would be utterly crazy, and he wasn’t entirely sure where I fit into that comparison.
This past week seemed to fly by. I wasn’t horribly busy, but kept having various things that took up my time. Thursday I agreed to take Chloe to the vet for a follow-up appointment, and then discovered I needed to also bring Mackenzie in for a follow-up in order to refill a prescription for her (sometimes I think the vet doesn’t communicate well enough with us, but it’s possible that we just dropped the ball on keeping track).
Taking care of the pets is time-consuming, AND expensive! These visits and medicine add up. I spent over two hours dealing with everybody on Thursday, and then administering all the medications is no small feat. Poor Chloe needs to wear a cone for awhile so she stops picking at this thing. The good news is that we found out a little more about what might be wrong with her, and ran some more tests on Mackenzie, so by early next week we’ll know more stuff. Things are looking up, I think.
Yesterday we went mattress shopping. We ended up at Mattress Firm and figured we’d just look, not buy, and then the salesman was fantastic and super-helpful, and convinced us to buy a higher end mattress than we’d planned, but I can’t wait to sleep on it. Delivery is tomorrow. I’d never chosen a mattress before, so it was both exciting and wow, such an odd experience. Lying down on a bunch of different beds while a salesman stands there telling you about coils and foam and whatnot. He was telling us about their delivery process and I was thinking, hmm, I could totally just take a nap right here. I’m pleased with the purchase though, and like I said, really looking forward to a new bed!
So yeah, what would you do if you were me? Run two halfs? My original fear of being too slow is still there, but this cool weather has given me confidence and maybe I can break 3 hours…I used to be a faster runner, and I know that I have it in me to be a faster runner again, but will my training allow for it? I know I trained pretty cautiously because I trained to finish strong and not to finish fast. Sigh. I feel like I’m definitely leaning towards REALLY challenging myself and doing the half tomorrow and the half next week, and hopefully feeling really awesome about it.
Some bloggers do a link love round up weekly…maybe I should do that too! I won’t promise it’ll be a regular thing, but here are a few links I’ve enjoyed this week.
From the Onion: loved this because I get so tired of women being criticized for well, everything
(edited to add, thank you for your cat-related comments on my last post! any more advice is necessary…)
Wednesday nights are a late night for Louie and me. He has class until after 10 so I wait until then to eat with him, usually…we are on this weird schedule of eating dinner after I finish teaching/he finishes classes, so it ends up being pretty late. Right now I’m blogging, and then I’m going to make some salmon and veggies and maybe have a glass of wine. I’ve never had a dinner break while teaching—I’d rather eat late and have dinner be my last thing for the day. I also never used to teach as late as I do! I think going forward I’ll try to cut it off at 8 pm, or maybe earlier some days and later others…some day Louie won’t have class and then maybe I won’t want to work so late every night. Then again, I have to work sometime, and before school gets out is hardly an option. Sigh. These are not actual problems though.
So, I had originally planned to run the Go Halloween Half this weekend, but I got nervous about the time limit—not that I shouldn’t be able to make it, but that I would be right at the end, and I worried that most of the course support would have ended. I decided to drop down and run the 10K this weekend, and then I found a deal for the Rock and Roll Half Marathon NEXT weekend. That one is more encouraging to walkers and has a much longer course time limit, so I figure it’ll be easier to be slow and still have support (i.e. water stops, maybe some folks cheering) along the way, plus…another week to train, ha! I also have a less busy day afterwards, which is entirely my fault, but I imagine finishing the race and then going and eating hash browns and pancakes and whatnot, and I don’t want to be rushed. So the fun thing is, two races, two weekends in a row! I’m excited!
Another fun thing I’m doing this weekend is playing some “World Chamber Music” written by Michael Hagmeier, who also plays didgeridoo and guitar. We are playing at the Artica Festival around 3:30 on Saturday, and I’m pumped. I am also a little terrified because at least half of the songs have “solo” sections where I have to improvise, but I’ve been doing ok in rehearsals…so maybe I can do okay in front of a crowd. Oh, and hopefully there WILL be a crowd! The weather looks lovely for the weekend, hopefully not too chilly for outdoor playing on Saturday, and awesome for running on Sunday.
(It’s important to leave a clean, folded towel out for the cat to sleep on.)
I’ve been stressed out for no good reason this week. I think I feel like I should be getting much more done than I am? And the house sometimes overwhelms me: between the animals making messes/shedding, too much stuff, some needed home repairs…sometimes it gets overwhelming. Then I try to remind myself we are making progress, and nobody is judging me and who cares if they are, and it’s not my fault…and I’m getting lots of great practicing in, and I even got my email inbox down to ONE page, meaning, no scrolling necessary to see all the emails, and I’m taking an Edx course on Opera, and… I type these things and I always feel a little neurotic. Do I come across that way?
Practicing selfie! I need to get my violin cleaned again…don’t look at how dirty my fingerboard is. That IS my fault.
On a pumpkin related note, I went to Trader Joe’s this morning. I thought when I went the other week things were out of hand, pumpkin-wise…but today was ridiculous. I don’t think I was ever out of arm’s reach of a pumpkin product. I did purchase pumpkin ravioli (already had it once, pretty good) and a pumpkin yogurt, but otherwise resisted. I wonder where the pumpkin tipping or breaking point is?
Having a blog is a funny thing—you don’t always want to go into a lot of things in your life. It’s like, you want your readers to know a lot about you, but not everything. Or you want to share, but you don’t want to overshare, or share too much about other people in your life.
That’s probably the main thing. The other people. My big other person is my boyfriend Louie, who I was fortunate to meet, and who I met not terribly long after my separation from my now ex-husband. I was lucky to meet Louie then, but I would have been lucky to meet him anytime. Arguably, meeting him a little later might have been luckier still as we both had a lot of baggage to work through, but we felt that we were the right people for each other, and that made it the right time. I wake up nearly every day feeling special.
But I digress. I really want this blog post to be about pets. I was renting, Louie is a homeowner, so when my lease was nearing its end we decided the practical thing would be to merge our households. We knew it might be a little soon for both of us, but financially it made sense, and it made sense personally as well—we knew we were in a serious relationship, and figured moving in together was the logical next step, and who was to say what “too soon” was.
So the biggest worry for me was how my cat would adjust to living with his cat and dog. I thought she was a fat, lovable, cuddly, sweetheart of a cat who might be terrified to move in with a giant black dog and a white cat who likes to cuddle with her claws extended on your neck. I did some reading and talked with my vet and came up with a gameplan. The first step was to move the fatness over and give her her own room of the house. For a week or so she lived in the bedroom by herself. After a few days we put up a babygate so the pets could see each other too but not touch. And, little did I realize that my sweet little cat was ACTUALLY kind of the meanest cat ever. She would growl and hiss at the other animals. She hated Chloe (the white cat) from the bottom of her heart. Once we started opening up the house further she would let out the scariest growls from under the bed, terrifying us all! She left scratches on Mackenzie and Chloe, and basically told them that she wasn’t to be messed with! Every doorway was a small battlefield, and around ever corner lay a potential fight. My sweet little cat was still the sweetest cat to me and Louie and other people, but I learned quickly that she was not to be messed with.
But time heals most wounds. Over time, she grew used to the other pets, and they grew used to her. They still hiss and fight, especially the two cats, especially when they are hungry and it’s feeding time, but the urgency and seriousness isn’t there anymore. Mackenzie still backs up when she sees the Dr. coming (we have taken to calling her Dr Oysterman—long story) but just this morning they had a moment of sniffing each other’s mouths before retreating to their separate areas. Chloe and the Dr. definitely fight over food (and that’s been made more difficult with Chloe having special diabetic food, sigh…) but otherwise they basically co-exist and have their own areas of the house that they hang out in, and occasionally they even relax near one another!
And as far as Louie and I, living together in an old house definitely has its challenges..dog fur EVERYWHERE, and moisture, and spiders, and clutter, but we are making relentless forward progress, and he is one of the most kind and generous people I know. Plus, I love living in a house that I “own”…technically I don’t, but I’m not really a tenant either…it’s nice having a sense of permanence about one’s living situation. I haven’t had that in my adult life, and didn’t know I missed it until I moved here! But that’s a post for another time.
(So, while the animals are generally getting along better, we are having some issues. Chloe is diabetic, and has been peeing where she shouldn’t. The advice we got from the vet was to keep the litter boxes super clean. We do have 3 boxes for the two cats, in various places…but she still pees on stuff rather than in them. It’s frustrating to say the least. Any advice, readers? She did have a urinary tract infection when she first got diagnosed with diabetes, but doesn’t have one now. )
So this is my first time blogging from my “new” computer. By new I mean that after I updated it to Windows 10 it was running really slow, and barely working, so Louie installed a solid state drive and now it is running like a dream, but Windows Live Writer (the program I use to blog on) is all weird looking! I guess I can probably mess around with it, but it was hard enough finding the program in the first place (or “app” as the kids call it, and by kids I mean Microsoft, and it’s driving me insane that everything on my PC is called an app when I’m pretty sure Apple came up with the nickname because it was sort of like the first syllable of the company name…but I digress…which is perhaps the point of parenthesis anyway…) so I am a little nervous to mess around. Maybe after this blog post I will do something.
So this week went by fairly quickly. Lots of the usual teaching and practicing and a few rehearsals. I especially enjoyed playing with Bach at the Sem this week—all Bach is just such a delight to play. It makes me grateful I have the opportunity to spend time learning solo Bach too. I am also working with a didgeridoo player for a performance at a festival this coming weekend (he wrote the music, and also plays some guitar) and have been having a lot of fun preparing that. I’d love to have a few more serious concerts on my schedule, but it’s not like I have nothing going on. (I sometimes think I go through concert withdrawal…I love performing, even though I sometimes get really stressed about it, and then when too long goes by without a solo/chamber music performance I start to really miss it!)
Last night my friend April had some folks over for a birthday party. She’s a few years younger than me (and holding) but she’s turning a year older on Monday and wanted to celebrate early. Now, Louie is having a birthday in a few weeks but he said he’d rather celebrate late than early…where do you stand? I feel like celebrating AFTER a birthday is anticlimactic, but he likened celebrating early to opening Christmas presents before Christmas… To each their own, obviously, but please weigh in with your opinion if you don’t mind. This is also a test to see if you are reading.
I was a little sad I didn’t run the Mo Cowbell run this year. The medals looked really cute, little cows on them…I’ve run it 3 years with NO cows, and this year they do cows. Probably I’ll run next year and there won’t be cows. I can’t find a picture online that I can share with you, unfortunately. I did a ten mile run the other day for my own half marathon training and started thinking about how once I get my speed up a little more I should do a marathon. It was my goal a few years ago and then life got in the way…I think I’m ready to start thinking about it again…
You can tell I’ve been running because I have a couple of running selfies on my phone. It looks like this weekend is a half marathon—I haven’t run a race all year, can you believe it? I’m nervous and I feel like that can’t possibly be true, but I can’t think of a race I’ve run, so…I think the last race was MO Cowbell last year! I’ve been having a great time running lately, so my smiles are genuine.
Okay, this isn’t the most exciting blog post of all time, but life doesn’t have to be exciting all the time, does it? Life is good and things are going well, and I’m grateful for what I have…and looking forward to a great month!
Somehow the other night I ended up reading through a few months of old blog entries. It was interesting, because they were from several years ago. I wrote a lot more often, but shorter and with less pictures, and while I was basically no more neurotic than I am now, I was overly concerned with my diet and exercise…now I’m eating well and exercising but not stressing over it (it’s delightful!) and mostly trying to enjoy being active and healthy! I wrote a lot about class teaching—at the time I was teaching at a variety of different places and totally stressed out, but still creatively full of ideas, which sometimes I feel like I lack today—I have spent this week so far trying to be fully committed to my students in their lessons (I’ll explain more in a bit). And lastly, I baked more often than I do now, which I really should change…I have a few old bananas in the freezer to make banana muffins with and I should just do it.
Being fully committed to my students: after teaching a student for awhile it’s easy to get a little lazy about technique points or allowing them to get away with things that at first I might have been very picky with. Part of that is how the students SIGH and roll their eyes, or worse, get upset, when I correct them. Sometimes after correcting the same thing (i.e. bow hold issue) over and over without it really getting fixed I feel like I need to give the student a break or they might murder me. But then sometimes that break becomes more than one lesson, or two lessons, and I realize wow, I haven’t bugged so-and-so about his-or-her bowhold for a long time, and it’s really holding them back, but I’m hesitating to do it because I know that it won’t be fun for them in the moment, or even for the next few weeks or months. But in the long run, it WILL make them a better violinist. And so this week (and last, too, and for many in the future) I’ve been really dedicating lessons to do those painful things, making the students work on their difficulties, and I will continue to do so, to be a more annoying teacher than perhaps I have been. I’ve been thinking long and hard about my long-term teaching and studio goals, and while I appreciate that most of my students enjoy their lessons and enjoy the violin, I want them to enjoy it more the way I do. The better you can play, the MORE enjoyment you get from it!
Outside of teaching, this has been an excellent week musically. My quartet is busy rehearsing Beethoven Op. 59 #1 and that’s been wonderful, and the past two evenings have been full of Bach for this weekend’s concert with Bach at the Sem. It’s so wonderful to play such beautiful music, and I love playing with the Bach group because the conductor is very demanding and insists on very particular phrasing. I enjoy the challenge! (Things to remember while teaching.)
Though…part of my ongoing blog theme is writing these posts acting like I’m opening some new door or doing something different, when I really just keep doing the same things! Life goes in phases, and when I’m in a new phase things seem fresh and new. That being said, I feel like I’ve been in a little bit of teaching rut, so I’m trying some new things to get out of it. My other thought is that I really should try to do some writing and get something else published in one of my association journals. Or work towards becoming an MTNA certified teacher? I know, I’m always pondering things to do to make myself busier and less stressed out, but I don’t want to be stagnant in my career.
I know, reading about me pondering my life goals and decisions is probably not the most interesting…but it’s interesting to me, and perhaps to you if you are a musician or simply spend too much time pondering and wonder if you are abnormal. In my opinion, you are totally normal!
I miss being in the woods. Is that weird? And honestly, my current mattress is so terrible that sleeping on a camping pad isn’t that much worse…plus I just really loved going to sleep and waking up hearing all the outdoor sounds. I don’t even recognize myself since evidently I’ve become one of those outdoorsy people, but I’m embracing it, and having gotten out of town for a bit of the weekend is definitely helping my mood, my ambition, and my mindset. (Maybe I’ve changed more in the past few years than rereading old blog posts made me realize?)
So tell me about your life. How have you changed in the past few years? Is there anything you can look at and say, yes, this has stayed the same, but this has changed? Am I asking you questions in summary as if this blog post made cohesive sense, when we all know that isn’t true? Leave your answers in the comments 😉
And here we are at Part 7 of the Road Trip Summer 2015 Trip Recaps. Did I say trip too many times? I’ve been procrastinating this post, and I’ll be honest: I haven’t finished writing about it by hand either (I kept a notebook journal on the trip) so I have pictures, short notes for each day, and my memories to rely on here. I’d better get something written, haven’t I? Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable!
Why am I procrastinating so much? Well, other than the fact that life and work are happening here…it’s because after Yellowstone the trip was a letdown. It had to happen. Everything we were doing was just so awesome, and then we left Yellowstone and headed east, and mentally we knew we were heading home, and honestly, no offense to the entire TripAdvisor South Dakota Forums, but Custer State Park and everything around Mount Rushmore is just not as awesome. Sorry!
But I am procrastinating EVEN MORE.
We left off with leaving Yellowstone. Louie and I decided to drive the Beartooth Highway after leaving Yellowstone. Charles Kuralt called it “the most beautiful drive in America.” It took us WAY up high, and there were tons of switchbacks, and I was mostly terrified and Louie had a great time driving it.
Some gorgeous views along the way!
It was cold and windy at the top, and it was a neat drive. I’m glad we did it. After that, we ended in the town of Red Lodge, Montana, which looked cute, but the first few hotels we looked at were full, so we made an online reservation at the “Western Inn” in Lowell, WY, and off we went. We’d decided tonight was a hotel night, and couldn’t wait. We also wanted to eat dinner at a restaurant.
(Along the way Louie took some pictures of sheep.)
We made it to the Western Inn. Lowell was a very small town, and the Western Inn was a little…well, there were bikers out and it looked like a pretty run-down, rent by the week type of place, and for approximately $45, we kind of expected it. The room was clean enough looking, though very out of date, and the owner also seemed to run a diner out of the lobby called the “Cauc-Asian” diner (she was of Asian descent) though, we couldn’t figure out how the diner worked. We ended up eating dinner at a restaurant called the Brandin’ Iron, and I had fried shrimp with fries, and we split apple cobbler for dessert. That and a few cold beers had never tasted better. And the Brandin’ Iron was amazing in so many ways, especially if you are looking at it from the point of city slicker snobs like Louie and I are 😉
Now, the other thing to know is that we hadn’t managed to get a shower in since our first night in the Tetons. We must have smelled amazing, and looked good too. After dinner I was able to enjoy the most desperately needed shower of my entire life. Seriously, it was amazing. And I slept really well in the bed.
Day 15: We woke up and considered trying to eat at the Cauc-Asian diner but I freaked out because it smelled odd and I just didn’t really understand how it worked. We also desperately needed to do laundry, and then get to the Devil’s Tower and then to Custer State Park in South Dakota, so I was having a stressed out day and was having a hard time with it. We got muffins at a gas station for breakfast and then headed east. On the way east we drove through the Bighorn Mountains which were really nice, though we were getting sad that we were nearing the end of our mountains. The whole time we’d had a Garmin hooked up for navigation and it kept track of our elevation. For days and days we’d been at over 8000 feet, and then up to nearly 11,000 feet, and suddenly we were getting lower and lower.
We found a laundromat around lunchtime and managed to do laundry while getting tex-mex and also grocery shopping in Buffalo, WY. The cashier at the grocery store was quite interested in our sparkling water, and she couldn’t believe it didn’t have high-fructose corn syrup.
Then it was time for the Devil’s Tower. We’d had started listening to the podcast “Serial” but once we got to the middle of nowhere, truly, that’s where the Devil’s Tower is!
We enjoyed walking around it and not being in the car for a little while, but we still had nearly 2 more hours to go until we got to our campground reservation at Custer State Park so we didn’t spend too much time there.
We did spent some time photographing prairie dogs.
The best part of the National Parks, with the possible exception of the amazing scenery, is all the wildlife.
It was dark by the time we got to Custer State Park. I’d made a reservation for two nights at Grace Coolidge Campground, and there wasn’t a place to check in—it was just “show up at your campsite”… and somebody was in ours. It took awhile to find it in the dark, and there was a truck parked in it and people had a fire. We verified with another camper that we were looking at the right site (she had come out to see what all the lights were about) and I guess I’d said, darkly, “so those are the people who are in our site!” The man came over and apologized and said he thought it was first-come, first-served…we’d made our reservations over a month prior! And the signage was clear. He said they would clear out as quickly as they could, so we drove around for a bit to give them space, but it was raining off and on and we were getting nervous, so we headed back. Both of us felt bad kicking this man and his wife out of their site—they were in the middle of cooking dinner too—but the fact was, the signs were clear that if you didn’t have a reservation you needed to call, and it was only about 9:30 pm, not midnight, and we did have the reservation. Sigh. It was hard to feel quite as nice about our campsite knowing we’d had to kick somebody out for it. We made a quick dinner ourselves and a little fire and then enjoyed the nearby creek sounds as we fell asleep.
Day 16: Today we wanted to hike up to the tallest point in South Dakota, Harney Peak. I’d read it was a difficult hike and might take us 5-6 hours. We got a slightly later start than usual, by about 3 hours and decided that was okay, and we were just worn out and tired from our vacation. (Life. Hard.)
We drove on the “Needles Highway” to get to the trailhead. It was a crazy drive, with all these rock formations and some one-lane tunnels through rocks.
The hike was nice. It ended up being only about 3-4 hours, and wasn’t nearly as strenuous as we’d thought. Granted, we still got passed by the young and the elderly as I’m a slow hiker, but we felt in pretty darned good shape!
Louie did a bit more exploring at the time while I rested on my laurels.
After finishing our hike, the other thing I really wanted to do was drive the Wildlife Loop in the park. Since we were done with our hike early we decided to go see the town of Custer (we’d both been to the area in the past, Louie more recently, and we just decided against Mount Rushmore and some other things in order to do different things than he remembered). Well, overall Custer was an awful town, but we stopped at Ester’s Sausage House, at first for coffee, and maybe dessert, and then decided to have beer and sausage instead (obviously more logically) and also bread pudding.
Towards sunset is the best time to see wildlife, so that’s when we hit the Wildlife Loop. One thing that is crazy is that there are these wild burros roaming around, but they are actually tame (they are descended from burros that used to carry people up to Harney Peak in the past but were set free at some point) and go up to the cars! People feed them (this is a case of where feeding animals is okay) and they are pretty pushy, actually. But cute.
We didn’t see too much other wildlife other that the burros and more prairie dogs and were getting disappointed…we did see where a young burro had gotten stuck in a horse pen, away from its mother and were a little upset, so we stopped at the next ranger station to tell them (so they could let the baby burro out), and then the next thing we found were…
Bison!!! And a good old-fashioned bison jam (also sounds like a delicious product to spread on toast, no?). Smaller in scale than at Yellowstone but no less delightful. It was our last bison jam and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Interesting fact from my diaries of the trip in 1991 with my family: we saw bison at the exact same point then.
After that we returned to our campsite for more dinner and relaxing. Overnight it started to rain…
Day 17:
We awoke to pouring rain. We both stayed in the tent as long as possible, but realized that yes, we did need to leave by noon, and at some point had to pack up. Originally we’d thought maybe we would do another hike in Custer, or something else, but we checked the forecast, and the Badlands were supposed to get a lot of rain the following day, so we decided to leave and try to see them before the rain ruined everything there. It was not fun packing up in the rain!
On our way to the Badlands (about a 2 hour drive) we saw a bunch of pronghorns! They are kind of like antelope, and we were excited to see them.
I’d made a reservation at the KOA White River. As a child, the KOA campgrounds were my favorite so I thought it would be fun to stay in one for old-time’s sake. I was also worried (originally) that it was going to be too hot and sunny in the Badlands National Park campground, and having a place with shade would be nicer. It turned out I shouldn’t have worried about that, but having showers and nice bathroom facilities was nice! We set up our tent, had lunch, and then headed to the Badlands, about 10 minutes away. This was definitely a “free”visit on our America the Beautiful pass (Devil’s Tower was another one that was covered). The clouds threatened, but we managed to see a lot of things.
We started with the Notch Trail. As a kid I had been too scared to go up this ladder on the trail, and as an adult I was pretty scared, but I figured if I could climb the stairs on Uncle Tom’s Trail at Yellowstone this was no big deal. On our way BACK to the car a pair of pronghorns ran by us, over the formations and around the corner. It was so neat to see how fast they moved.
We drove around the Badlands Loop next, and stopped at a variety of overlooks. It was cold and windy, which was definitely a surprise, but the views were still really beautiful.
We saw a bunch more prairie dogs, and a small pack of goats (that blocked the road) and a lone bighorn sheep, though we didn’t even realize it at the time and thought it was a male goat—it was neat to realize it was a bighorn sheep since that was one we hadn’t “checked off” yet!
I wanted to drive on the Sage Rim Road, which is a gravel road where the bison and other wildlife/views are, but it was sadly, closed due to too much rain. According to the ranger too many cars had gotten stuck so they closed the rain. Disappointed, we headed back to our campsite.
Our little tent on the last night of camping. Notice how Louie likes to put the hatchet into a stump. We made a lovely fire and had a typical meal and just enjoyed being outside for the last night.
Day 18:
We had awoken several times during the night to some terrifying storms. Lightning and thunder and wind like you wouldn’t believe, and I was relieved that the tent survived and that we didn’t have to evacuate or something! I didn’t know if there was a tornado warning system, or something like that. I was glad we’d gotten to enjoy every night with dinner and a fire outside, but man, packing up all of our wet tent parts for the second day in a row wasn’t that fun. We got the car loaded up—the rain had mostly let up, and we drove through the Badlands on our way to highway 90.
The rest of the trip that day was uneventful. We finished the Serial podcast, and decided to try to get to Kansas City. We’d originally planned to eat at a restaurant Louie recalled, La Bodega, but their hours online weren’t correct and they were closing as we arrived. We ate at a nearby Mexican restaurant called El Pueblito and had wonderful margaritas and shrimp tacos, before checking into a suite at a 4 star hotel, the Crown Plaza, that we found on Priceline for around $75. It was…a bit nicer than our previous hotel. We walked to The Yardhouse, a nearby pub, for a nightcap before turning in.
Day 19:
One of the reasons we got our room for so cheap was the fact that the hotel was under construction. Around 9 am we awoke to loud construction noises…but we decided to relax, order room service, and enjoy the amenities (including a wonderful shower..) until nearly noon when we had to check out. From Kansas City to St Louis is about a 4 hour drive…and then we were home. Safe and sound.
The end! I’m so proud to finally have finished my trip recaps, even though I feel like I rushed this one—sometimes you just have to sit down and WRITE. Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions or comments let me know.
and I feel like that can’t possibly be true, but I can’t think of a race I’ve run, so…I think the last race was MO Cowbell last year! I’ve been having a great time running lately, so my smiles are genuine.
